My time is dwindling as the baby gets older. She used to nap beside me on the couch but now that she can roll around and belly shimmy, she’s sleeping in her crib. That means I have to spend that precious time actually doing stuff and no longer have the excuse for never getting off the couch.

Choosing what to do with my time is difficult as I still WANT to sit on the couch and stuff.

And, yep, she just woke up as soon as I starting typing…

I don’t have a lot of time left so I’ll just get to the point. It was important to me that I share this picture with you:

That is Katie Holmes with a seriously not amused Ooompa Loompa at some kind of event. When I saw it, I thought, “This is the greatest picture ever taken.” So of course it is of the utmost importance that all of you see it as well. I know art is subjective, but come one, this is the best, right?

I was listening to my cable providers music on demand station, the oldies station, and a song named “Patches” came on. There’s apparently TWO songs from the era named Patches, but they aren’t about the same Patches because one’s a boy and one’s a girl. This particular Patches was about the girl one. Dickey Lee sings of, “Patches my darling of old Shantytown,” with whom he was planning a summer wedding. Did this wedding happen? NO! His parents forbade it for no reason, sings Dickey. WHY!!?????

Well, it turns out, as poor Dickey overhears:

“I hear a neighbor telling my father
He says, a girl name of Patches was found floating face down
In that dirty old river that flows by the coal yards”

Uh, ok then. Dickey then sings of joining her that evening blah blah blah. Anyway, I looked at the album they had listed for it and it was: Last Kiss: Songs of Teen Tragedy. All the great teen deaths are there, from Leader of the Pack to Teen Angel! So many dead teens!

There are fourteen songs on this CD. Each more tragic than the next. But, they forgot a few:

1. “Braces,” about a boy (Johnny) and a girl (Judy) who made out and got their braces stuck together and starved to death.

2. “Sunburned Cutie,” sample lyrics:

She thought it’d be ok
just a few hours of sun and fun
but she was out there the whole day

When her momma came looking for her
all she found was a towel and sunglasses
she was just a sunburned cutie, a sun tanning amateur

3. “Lil’ Escalator Girl,” he never learned her name, he was at the mall and saw her from afar, then her shoelaces got caught in the escalator and all her skin came off.

4. “Prehistoric Rebel,” lyrics, the spoken climax:

But, Johnny didn’t want to sweep the cave floor
He ran away.
His sabretooth pelt got caught in a branch.
I saw him struggling, but there was nothing I could do.
A t-rex got him and ripped him in half.
Now I have to go to the dance….alone.

5. “Goodbye My Bicycling Baby,” about a responsible teen who thought motorcycles were too dangerous but ironically dies in a bicycling accident.

6. “Scattering Susie’s Ashes.” That’s pretty self explanatory.

7. “My Little Teen Funeral Girl,” this is about a girl who’s at another teen’s funeral (parachute didn’t open) who dies in a freak folding chair accident at the cemetery.

8. “Mama, Since You’re Dying Anyway, Can You Get a Message to Johnny?” lyrics:

Mama, I’ve got a message for Johnny
I’ve written down every word
If you end up croakin’
can you pass it on to him?

The bible says you can’t bring
personal possessions to heaven
but maybe, just maybe,
you can bring
other peoples’ notes

9. “I’ll Never Forget You (Because the Death of A Boyfriend is Just Generally Something You Don’t Forget)”

10. “Soda Shop Angel,” this would have been the saddest of all the teen tragedy songs if there weren’t three verses about the singer continuing to send his food back for various reasons.

11. “Angel Angel,” about the ghost of a dead teenager (running with scissors mishap) being exorcised from the house he was haunting, thus “dying” again and becoming a double angel, very rare.

12. “Why Couldn’t the Fire Ants Have Swarmed Me, Instead?” a young man’s lament at a romantic picnic gone wrong.

Lydia has started eating “solid” foods – gruel and the like. While I appreciate that the rice cereal I bought for her is organic, I’m not sure about their labor practices:

These babies don’t even get bathroom breaks – they have to wear diapers! Also it doesn’t seem very safe to force them to wear no clothes while they’re harvesting, that’s just going to lead to sunburns. They’re not even training their employees right – look how that baby is holding the watering can – there’s a handle for a reason for God’s sake!

I’m sure the employees get paid in empty gift bags, tissue paper, old pairs of glasses, and empty plastic soda bottles, so I’m not sure I should be paying as much as I did for this cereal. Surely with this workforce it could be much cheaper and they could still turn a profit.

Two houses ago, when we moved into our first house in Georgia, after we’d been there a while, we found a couple of odd things in the backyard. Mainly, it was the occasional discarded Almond Joy wrapper.

Seeing as how I do not like coconut and there’s no reason Tom would be secretly eating coconut candy in the backyard (I’m not a candy dictator), the only logical conclusion to make was that we were being stalked. Stalked by someone who like to eat Almond Joys while he watches people watch TV, apparently.

The Almond Joy Killer, we called him (or her, don’t want to make assumptions).

We were never murdered (I guess they only “kill” Almond Joys), and we eventually moved. We moved on with our lives. And we moved AGAIN, to a different state.

I was worried I had lost these. Luckily, they turned up in a box a few months ago. Needless to say I was very relieved. They’re from 1976, they’re weird, and they’re fabulous:

Why do these exist? Why? To make me happy, that’s why. These are four ceramic planters, just a few inches tall, and each of the heroes is proclaiming “SUPER PLANTS” for no reason. I like to imagine the four of them brainstorming and trying to come up with something clever they’d all say and that’s the best they could come up with. Also Batman seems to have a talking armpit.

Notice that you have your three standard Super Friends/Justice League heroes: Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman, and then you have Gomer Pyle Captain Marvel, or/and/also known as Shazam! because of weird DC/Marvel comics shiz.

No Aquaman despite that fact that water, Aquaman’s realm, is one of the things plants need to survive.

Not that I would plant anything in them. The last thing I would want would be to plant some seeds, and then, OF COURSE, they would become super plants and the roots could potentially crack my beloved ceramic planters. No, no, that wouldn’t do.

I looked these up and found this interesting post (interesting if you are interested in 1970s plant-related superhero merchandising which, duh, everyone is).

I got mine about 9 years ago off of ebay, and if you search right now, you can actually buy the entire store display piece plus 3 of each of them for 70 bucks. Although if you do end up with something that powerful in your possession you must promise only to use it for good.